Category: Media

Elite Media Can’t Stop Lying About Guns in America

The mainstream media lies to us. They feed us propaganda. They don’t want us to know that gun ownership is widespread and that armed defense is common. I was at a conference for minor-media this weekend. There, an associate talked about being turned away from most of his local news stations because “we don’t run pro-gun stories. No self-defense.” Let me show you where the propaganda starts at the top.

Dr. John Lott looked at the five largest newspapers in the US. They ran 1 self-defense story for every 1300 stories of criminal activity with a gun. (more here)

The good news, and there is some good news, is that we know better. We have data that comes from outside the media bubble. We caught major US newspapers lying to us. We can actually measure the amount of media distortion.

We use a firearm for defense far more often than the thugs use guns during a crime. We legally defend ourselves about four times more often than a criminal uses a gun to threaten or injure us (467 thousand criminal incidents vs 1.4-2.3 million defensive gun uses).

We can quantify the media exaggeration. Honest reporting would tell us when we were attacked and also tell us when we defended ourselves. That isn’t what we get from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, or the Wall Street Journal. Each time it occurs, these major US newspapers were over 5 thousand times more likely to run a story of victimization than defense. Distortions of that magnitude can’t be an accident. That censorship is the result of deliberate editorial policy.

That is serious. That biased reporting distorts public perception of violence and defense. It twists public policy, and it isn’t an accident. Media propaganda isn’t a fault, but a deliberate feature that was bought and paid for.

Anti-gun billionaires paid millions of dollars to twist the news. They ran “educational” conferences for the media on how to report self-defense as “gun violence”. They also pay propagandists to recommend movie and TV scripts that distort the truth about civilian self-defense.

You can prove it to yourself. We defend ourselves more often than the police, and ordinary citizens make fewer mistakes with a gun than the police. So, when was the last time you saw an honest portrayal of armed defense on the TV cop dramas where an ordinary person used a firearm responsibly? I couldn’t find a single one.

Media apologists have said that self-defense isn’t news. I disagree. The biased media buries armed defense stories even in incidents where armed citizens stopped mass murder. Again, the media was too busy lying about us and our neighbors to report the truth.

I’m reminded of the Chinese immigrant who said he never watched the news when he was in China because he knew the news was filled with lies. Again, let me close by sharing some good news. We’re walking away from the lying media. CNN lost half its viewers in the last year.

Find real news and listen past the lies.

Just another confirmation that the editors at the Washington Post are clueless morons.

 

Stephen Gutowski Profile picture
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Nobody on The Washington Post’s editorial board noticed the irony of putting these two paragraphs back-to-back? Does on the opinion side of D.C.’s biggest paper even know what the gun laws there are? washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
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WaPo’s editorial board says solution to the accidental shooting it highlights is to pass an assault weapons ban, universal background checks, and a safe storage law. But, the place it happened ALREADEY HAS all of those laws. 
Here is DC’s assault weapons ban: code.dccouncil.us/dc/council/cod…
Here is DC’s law that requires all sales, and even transfers, only occur between people who have a registration certificate which requires a background check and more: code.dccouncil.us/dc/council/cod…
Here is DC’s safe storage law. Anyone who stores a gun in a way that minor is likely to gain access to it could face up to 5 years depending on the circumstances: code.dccouncil.us/dc/council/cod…

Observation O’ The Day
Another reason may just be the concentration of ownership of major media in the hands of a few, very wealthy, people. Wealthy people have feared armed commoners for most of recorded history, and especially since the invention of reliable, concealable firearms, so publication of news likely to encourage gun ownership is discouraged.

There Are Far More Defensive Gun Uses Than Murders in America. Here’s Why You Rarely Hear of Them.

While Americans know that guns take many innocent lives every year, many don’t know that firearms also save them.

On May 15, an attacker at an apartment complex in Fort Smith, Ark., fatally shot a woman and then fired 93 rounds at other people before a man killed him with a bolt-action rifle. Police said he “likely saved a number of lives in the process.”

On June 30, a 12-year-old Louisiana boy used a hunting rifle to stop an armed burglar who was threatening his mother’s life during a home invasion.

On July 4, a Chicago gunman shot into a crowd of people, killing one and wounding two others before a concealed handgun permit holder shot and wounded the attacker. Police praised him for stepping in.

Al Hartmann/The Salt Lake Tribune via AP
According to academic estimates, defensive gun uses — including when guns are simply shown to deter a crime — are four to five times more common than gun crimes.
Al Hartmann/The Salt Lake Tribune via AP

These are just a few of the nearly 1,000 instances reported by the media so far this year in which gun owners have stopped mass shootings and other murderous acts, saving countless lives. And crime experts say such high-profile cases represent only a small fraction of the instances in which guns are used defensively. But the data are unclear, for a number of reasons, and this has political ramifications because it seems to undercut the claims of gun rights advocates that they need to possess firearms for personal protection — an issue now before the Supreme Court.

Americans who look only at the daily headlines would be surprised to learn that, according to academic estimates, defensive gun uses — including instances when guns are simply shown to deter a crime — are four to five times more common than gun crimes, and far more frequent than the fewer than 20,000 murders each year, with or without a gun. But even when they prevent mass public shootings, defensive uses rarely get national news coverage. Those living in major news markets such as New York City, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles are unlikely to hear of such stories.

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update:
FAA clears Fox News drones to fly again.

Fox Reporter Outfoxes Biden FAA After They Try to Stop His Drone Coverage of Huge Illegal Alien Influx

Biden’s Withdrawal From Reality

The Democratic Party and its apparatchiks in the media keep asking the American people variations on a single question: What are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

From the Trump/Russia collusion fantasy and concocted claims that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation,” to ongoing efforts to cast an America that has never been freer or fairer as a nation riddled with “systemic” racial oppression, they keep insisting that we reject clear and convincing evidence and embrace politically driven falsehoods.

The latest example is President Biden’s refusal to even acknowledge the catastrophic failure of his withdrawal from Afghanistan. The nation heard him say on July 8 that it was highly unlikely that the Taliban would overrun the country. The Washington Post reports that his senior leadership team was caught so unaware by the Taliban’s August advance that many were on vacation when Kabul fell. Then came the images of chaotic panic at the airport, a grim scene turned violently grisly when a suicide bomber murdered scores of people, including 13 Americans.

Biden subsequently described the withdrawal as an “extraordinary success” even as he left behind lethal state-of-the-art military equipment worth billions of dollars as well as many Americans and Afghans who had aided us during the 20-year struggle – including the interpreter who helped rescue Biden himself in 2008.

Slowly but surely the mainstream press, which initially covered the debacle forthrightly,  is beginning to embrace Biden’s narrative. Ezra Klein offered his New York Times readers a fatuous counterfactual defense: “A better withdrawal was possible — and our stingy, chaotic visa process was unforgivable — but so was a worse one.” Jonathan Karl of ABC News played the Trump card: “The truth is that Biden accomplished exactly what Trump had tried to do in his final year in office. The only real difference is that Trump wanted to withdraw more quickly and with less regard for the Afghan citizens who worked with the United States.”

Expect to hear more of the same in the coming weeks. Don’t be surprised if Biden is nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. The brazenness is stunning. This is not your typical political spin, it is propaganda. It is the willful effort to corrupt our perception of reality. Say it loud and long enough and people will believe it. If they don’t, get Twitter mobs and cancel culture to silence and punish them. That is increasingly becoming the Democrats’ playbook.

Why do they do it? The obvious and most important answer is that they can, and it is incredibly useful. The spread of the Trump/Russia conspiracy theory helped them hobble a presidency just as the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story helped them win an election.

They are able to get away with it because they have convinced their allies in the press and millions of voters that our nation is locked in an existential battle with an evil enemy: the Republican Party. False narratives that kneecap the enemy are serving a higher truth; admissions of error are taboo because they will only strengthen the opposition. Give no quarter is their mantra.

There is also a politico-psychological dynamic behind this posture. Democrats are the party of well-educated elites, whose position in society and sense of self are anchored in their belief in their intellectual merit. Likewise, the Democratic Party’s argument for an all-powerful government is based on claims of competence and expertise. Acknowledging errors undermines their claims to authority.

This helps explain the lack of accountability. Firing, say, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken or Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley for the Afghanistan debacle would suggest that our brilliant leaders are not so brilliant.

To admit the obvious, yes, Republicans practice deception all the time. And it is also corrosive. But they do not control the government or, more importantly, the news. Their lies are almost always exposed, while those of the Democrats are often propagated.

This is at the root of our country’s deep divide. Even thoughtful conservatives are rightly skeptical of most everything they are told. This increasingly knee-jerk antagonism not only leads some to seek the truth, but also others to reject honest information, such as the efficacy of vaccines.

When you don’t know who to trust, you don’t know what to trust. As long as our leaders keep trying to subvert reality, this is the reality we are consigned to inhabit.

The juvenile ‘It’s horse paste!’ critique of ivermectin.

The Nobel Prize in medicine in 2015 went to two scientists whose experiments on a type of bacteria and subsequent modifications produced a compound that led to “a new class of drugs with extraordinary efficacy against parasitic diseases,” in the words of the Nobel Prize committee.

That compound is ivermectin, which “turned out to be highly effective in both animals and humans against a variety of parasites, including those that cause River Blindness and Lymphatic Filariasis.” The FDA approved the drug in 1996.

That’s why U.S. doctors wrote more than 100,000 prescriptions a year for ivermectin, which comes in tablets but also in a lotion. In 2020, the FDA approved one ivermectin lotion as an over-the-counter lice treatment.

So why does the major media want you to believe that ivermectin is simply a “horse paste”?

The answer is probably because the media are more interested in scoring cheap points in the game of culture-wars by mocking rednecks and conservatives than they are in informing their readers.

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Why Southerners Don’t Care About New York Times Op-Eds

I was born and raised in the Deep South. I have a deep affinity for the place of my birth, one that I wouldn’t have imagined I’d have in my teenage years.

Down here, we have our issues, to be sure, but one thing we’ve never been really big on are people from the North trying to tell us how to live our lives. Call it a holdover from Reconstruction or just plain stubbornness, but when the New York Times tries to tell Southerners how to live, it usually doesn’t work out well.

Yet, that’s pretty much what the Times decided to do with an op-ed titled, “Southern Republicans Cannot Be Trusted With Public Health.”

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Gold Star Mother Locked Out of Facebook Account After Sharing Her Story on Meeting President Biden

The grieving mother of a fallen Marine, Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikou, met with President Joe Biden on Sunday at the dignified transfer ceremony at Dover Air Force Base.

The mother, Shana Chappell, took to social media to share her agonizing story of meeting the president, which didn’t sit well with the Facebook and Instagram censors. She was locked out of her social media accounts for what she had to say about the president.

“President Joe Biden, This [message] is for you!” Chappell wrote. “I know my face is etched into your brain! I was able to look you straight in the eyes yesterday and have words with you. After I lay my son to rest you will be seeing me again!”

Image credit: Shana Chappell/Facebook

“Remember I am the one who stood 5 inches from your face and was letting you know I would never get to hug my son again, hear his laugh and then you tried to interrupt met and give me your own sob story and I had to tell you ‘that this isn’t about you so don’t make it about you!!!!’” she wrote.

“You then said you just wanted me to know that you know how I feel and I let you know that you don’t know how I feel and you do not have the right to tell me you know how I feel!” she said.

“[You] then rolled your f***ing eyes in your head like you were annoyed with me and I let you know that the only reason I was talking to you was out of respect for my son and that was the only reason why,” Chappell added. “I then proceeded to tell you again how you took my son away from me and how I will never get to hug him, kiss him, laugh with him again, etc.”

“[You] turned to walk away and I let you know my sons blood was on your hands and you threw your hand up behind you as you walked away from me like you were saying ‘ok whatever!!!” she continued.

“You are not the president of the United States of America Biden!!!!” Chappell wrote. “Cheating isn’t winning!!! You are not leader of any kind! You are a weak human being and a traitor!!!”

“You turned your back on my son, on all of our Heros!!! You are leaving the White House one way or another because you do not belong there!” Chappell continued. “MY SONS BLOOD IS ON YOUR HANDS!!! All 13 of them, their blood is on your hands!!!!”

“If my president Trump was in his rightful seat then my son and the other Heros would still be alive!!!!” Chappell added. “You will be seeing me again very soon!!!”

“[By the way] as my son and the rest of our fallen Heros were being taken off the plane yesterday I watched you disrespect us all 5 different times by checking your watch!!!” she said. “What the f*** was so important that you had to keep looking at our watch????”

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Comment O’ The Day:
“Not if you want to tamp down panic over who’s running the country.”

Should ABC publish the full, raw video of the Biden-Stephanopoulos interview?

Answer: Yes. Will they? Not on your life. Joe Biden’s strange, emotionally disconnected interaction with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos yesterday raised more than a few questions, especially given Biden’s non-sequitur speech yesterday on COVID-19 and refusal to take any questions. At points in the interview with Stephanopoulos, Biden didn’t look entirely engaged, and when he was engaged, it was to scoff at the suffering of the Afghans as so four days ago, man:

STEPHANOPOULOS: But we’ve all seen the pictures. We’ve seen those hundreds of people packed into a C-17. You’ve seen Afghans falling–

BIDEN: That was four days ago, five days ago.

That answer and its complete lack of empathy will haunt Biden and Democrats for a long time to come. It drives a stake through the heart of the myth of Biden’s supposed compassion, which was the only quality that could compensate for his lack of competence.Curiously — at least according to the edited cut — Stephanopoulos never followed up on that response, not even to correct Biden to say it had happened two days earlier. That and other aspects of the released clips raised the question of whether Stephanopoulos coached Biden, or at least cosseted him in a way that couldn’t have happened in a true press briefing. If so, that might be powerful evidence of intentional bias on ABC’s part, as well as evidence of non-competence on Biden’s part. Our friend Hugh Hewitt has demanded that ABC produce the raw video showing the full Biden/Stephanpolous performance:

ABC has responded by releasing the full transcript. That’s not necessarily the same thing, and it doesn’t answer the real question. Just how much did Stephanopolous do to prop up Biden, and would ABC News transcribe any such support? Duane Patterson makes the explicit case:

News organizations only rarely publish the raw tape of interviews in their entirety. Of course, when it comes to David Daleiden and James O’Keefe, that’s the gold standard they apply (“heavily edited tapes” is a cliché in such reporting). In this case, if the tape exonerates Stephanopoulos, perhaps ABC News will release it to quash this criticism. If they don’t, perhaps we can draw some conclusions from their lack of transparency.

However, any action they take now won’t address a more basic issue with this stunt. Joe Biden has avoided taking questions from the White House press corps for over a week in the middle of the worst foreign-policy and military debacle the US has suffered in at least 46 years. Why did they let Biden off the hook with this one-on-one, quarterbacked by a former Clinton staffer, rather than with their own White House correspondent Jonathan Karl, an actual reporter rather than a morning-show host? All this does is give Biden an excuse not to answer these questions in the future by claiming he’s already answered them and brushing Afghanistan off as old news … while thousands of Americans remained trapped behind Taliban lines.

Even the raw tape won’t answer that criticism. The whole effort was nothing but a free pass. And in the end, Biden couldn’t even handle that competently.

 

 

Courts can’t decide if embedding photo and video tweets could constitute copyright infringement
Not all courts are going with the “server test.”

In 2007, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that embedding posts with copyrighted images from social media sites on other websites does not constitute a copyright violation.

The ruling, known for establishing the so-called “server test,” states that unless content is stored on the server of a site sued for copyright infringement, the accusation does not stand thanks to the nature of the embed technology.

But now this rule is getting increasingly challenged in federal courts, with those in New York more prone than ever to allow copyright cases involving embedded content to proceed, Bloomberg Law writes.

In one ruling published in late July, the District Court for the Southern District of New York found the server test rule to be “contrary to the text and legislative history of the Copyright Act.”

The implications of what appears to be emerging as the “anti-embed” trend could be multiple, affecting both the way social media and sites embedding content posted there and stored on their servers function. Furthermore, the already complicated legal scene in the US around online copyright rules could become even more complex if the the main appeals courts tackling copyright cases – the Second and Ninth Circuits – take opposing stances.

The upcoming judgment in a lawsuit involving Newsweek could, if lost on appeal, bring this issue to a head and require the US Supreme Court to get involved in order to address the rift.

In the meanwhile, sites embedding content are not the only ones facing legal action. Social networks like Instagram are too. The Facebook company is dealing with a class action lawsuit in California, accused of “inducing infringement” by providing embed tools (i.e., APIs).

Copyright lawyers are supportive of the recent trend and expect it to continue, arguing that the server test rule does not take into account “display and public performance rights that are part and parcel with copyright” – as Foley Hoag LLP’s Joshua Jarvis put it.

But their intellectual property counterparts see it from a different angle – that rights holders who don’t want to see their content embedded should not upload it on social media platforms that provide embed tools.

According to Fenwick & West LLP’s Andrew P. Bridges, “friction on the internet” would be increased “massively” without the server test, while he fears “chaos” if displaying embedded content becomes a legal liability.

The left, liars and hypocrites.
But we already knew this from so many prior examples

The Co-Founder Of The Fact-Checking Site Snopes Was Writing Plagiarized Articles Under A Fake Name
“You can always take an existing article and rewrite it just enough to avoid copyright infringement.”

David Mikkelson, the co-founder of the fact-checking website Snopes, has long presented himself as the arbiter of truth online, a bulwark in the fight against rumors and fake news. But he has been lying to the site’s tens of millions of readers: A BuzzFeed News investigation has found that between 2015 and 2019, Mikkelson wrote and published dozens of articles containing material plagiarized from news outlets such as the Guardian and the LA Times…………..

Founded in 1995 by Mikkelson and his then-wife, Barbara Hamel, Snopes bills itself as “the internet’s definitive fact-checking site,” and is a two-time Webby Award winner cited by the likes of the New York Times and the Washington Post. It served as one of Facebook’s fact-checking partners between December 2016 and February 2019. But in recent years, the site has been troubled by a bitter ownership dispute.

Mikkelson’s alias flies in the face of the site’s mission, once described by the New York Times as “a quest to debunk misinformation online.”

You daily example of “Crap For Brains”

This is what they think they deserve, goobermint control and largesse at the taxpayer’s expense. The goobermint has no ‘duty’ past the 1st amendment guarantee that; “Congress shall make no law….. abridging the freedom of …..the press…..”

Martha Minow, a professor and former dean of Harvard Law School, is the author of “Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech.” Newton Minow served as chair of the Federal Communications Commission under President Kennedy.

“Minow outlines an array of reforms, including a new fairness doctrine, regulating digital platforms as public utilities, using antitrust authority to regulate the media, policing fraud, and more robust funding of public media.”

Why government has a constitutional duty to save the news industry

Only one private institution is mentioned in the Constitution: the press. Our nation’s founders recognized that a press free to criticize those in power and spread information across society is essential in democracy. But what does that mean today when we see newspapers disappearing every month? Is our government failing to meet its duty to protect and strengthen the press?

The 1st Amendment assumes the existence and durability of a private news industry. This suggests the Constitution not only allows but requires the government to take steps to keep the press viable. And in fact, the government has done this since the beginning of the republic.

The current press landscape demands new action. Journalism jobs over the past two decades have declined by 60%. As newspapers close and local broadcasting and cable news reduce investment in reporting, digital platforms have diverted ad revenues and enabled the spread of conspiracy theories and misinformation. Especially notable is the loss of reporting in smaller towns, suburbs and rural areas, leaving thousands of American communities with no local coverage. This decline may even be tied to fewer candidates for office in local elections.

The idea of government intervention in the news media is not new. Throughout our nation’s history, the federal government has directly and indirectly contributed to the cultivation and growth of the news industry.

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A Reporter Shoots an AR-15 and Absolute Hilarity Ensues

If there’s one thing Democrats have taught us about AR-15s, it’s that they are the most powerful, deadly weapons of war ever created, assembled by the devil himself. Of course, anyone that knows anything about the platform and the round it shoots knows that’s nonsense, but still, when someone of a leftward persuasion shoots one, hilarity often ensues.

That’s what was on tap when Kevin McCallum, writing for Seven Days in Vermont, decided to share his experience shooting an AR-15 at an indoor gun range. To hear him tell it, he basically had an out-of-body experience due to the massive, bone-rattling recoil.

Seriously, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out this is satire, but all indications are that it’s real, and it’s spectacular.

I’d hate to see this guy shoot my .308, which itself is not a very hard kicking gun. Still, if he did, it might break him in half. I also own an AR-15, and I can personally vouch for the recoil being non-existent. It’s just a 55 grain .22 caliber bullet, after all. My wife, who is not even 110 pounds, laughed after the first time she shot it. At no point did she describe it as deep shockwaves coursing through her body after a meteor landed in front of her. She certainly wasn’t “rattled” by the explosion.

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A Ministry of Fear Rules America.

Back in 1943, the British novelist Graham Greene published “The Ministry of Fear,” a thriller set in World War II London involving mercy killings, exploding suitcases, seances, Luftwaffe air raids, outright murder, insane asylums and undercover Nazi spies. It was successfully made into a movie the following year starring Ray Milland as the troubled protagonist, and directed by Fritz Lang, himself a refugee from Hitler.

Both novel and film capture the paranoid atmosphere during that troubled time, with danger lurking even in something as innocent as a cake. Whom or what can you trust? As the world falls apart, and the future is shrouded in threat and mystery, society devolves into a dog-eat-dog struggle for survival, in which neither the old verities nor the old pieties obtain any longer.

Welcome to America, 2021. In just a few short months since the mysterious elevation of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., inexplicably elected the 46th president of the United States, our country has undergone a stunning rapid devolution from a confident, economic powerhouse to a shabby debtor nation afraid of its own shadow.

The American Ministry of Fear, however, is not located in the Chancellery of the National Socialist German Workers Party in Berlin, but in every petty federal, state, and local bureaucracy, doctor’s office, TV news station, big-city newspaper, college and university in the country.

From the start of the COVID-19 manufactured panic, these agents of influence have waged a relentless war on the American psyche. And now, despite their miniscule majorities in Congress, they rule with an iron fist that brooks no demurral.

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Actual Atlantic headline:

BLUF:
Article author Applebaum writes that Lindell thinks the Chicoms stole the election by hacking it in Biden’s favor and is spending millions trying to prove it, after which the Supreme Court will vote to put Trump back in office.
She doesn’t think he will be able to prove it, but assuming he did somehow, he would apparently be destroying democracy by putting the actual winner of the election back in office.